Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund. Martin Sauter
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the years, two towering figures have emerged in the field of research on exiled German-Jewish film artists, with both scholars having significantly contributed to our understanding of exile in Hollywood and its implications. The first of these is Jan-Christopher Horak. Taking into account Horak’s family history as the son of émigrés, and the political and cultural background of the 1970s, it is not surprising that he should have emerged as a leading figure in exile research. Horak stands as a scholar and pioneer to whom every subsequent exile researcher is indebted, inasmuch as he embarked on groundbreaking research at a time when no academic studies on the émigré film artists were available. Horak’s contribution to exile research is invaluable in several respects. First, he pioneered an oral history approach. Furthermore, by identifying genres specific to émigrés, he not only provided subcategories for future researchers, but also laid the foundation for similar investigations.
Horak’s preoccupation with exile research was triggered by his MA thesis on Lubitsch. This preoccupation with Lubitsch - who was, after all, an early émigré - resulted in his oral history project and the subsequent publication of ‘The Palm Trees ...’. This, in turn, sparked an more focused inquiry of how - or if - these exiled film artists had any influence on American culture, particularly its film industry, leading to the publication of Anti-Nazi-Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood 1939 - 1940 (Münster: MAKS, 1984), his doctoral thesis. Put differently, quoting Horak himself, ‘once the biographical and filmographical facts of emigration are established, research can now move on to the next stage’ (Horak 1984: XV).
Anti-Nazi-Filme built on his previous research insofar as Horak drew on, first of all, the oral histories he previously conducted, as well other findings already used in ‘Palm Trees .
Anti-Nazi-Filme constitutes the first scholarly attempt to assess the mark the émigrés have left on the film industry of a host country, in this case the United States. His study, as Horak points out in the introduction ‘combines two areas of research which thus far have always been looked at separately - if at all: research on the German speaking emigration in Hollywood and research on American war propaganda’ (Horak 1984: XVii). He starts from the premise that the contribution of the émigrés to America’s film industry was more evident in the anti-Nazi films than in any other genre, maintaining that ‘the influence of the emigrant film-artists in Hollywood should not be underestimated, since as Europeans, they were in the position to fill certain gaps in Hollywood’s film industry’ (Horak 1984: XV). According to Horak, ‘of around 180 films, made between 1939 and 1945, which can be classified as anti-Nazi films, the émigrés contributed to sixty of them’ (Horak 1984: 80). Horak starts his examination by providing a detailed history of German-Jewish exile, including ties between the German and American film industries prior to 1933. He then looks at film propaganda in WWII, moving on to describe the changes in the official US position towards Nazi Germany and how this differed at times from that of Hollywood. Horak then gives an exhaustive account of the Office of War Information and its inception in June 1942, detailing its influence and the effect of its instructions on the US film industry. The body of Horak’s book, however, consists of a cross-section of 13 anti-Nazi films, selected for the significance of aspects of their production history and their reception. For each film, Horak starts by first recounting its production history, before moving on to its reception, followed by biographical sketches of émigré participants. He then gives a brief description of the film’s narrative followed by a textual analysis in terms of anti-Nazi propaganda. Horak surmises that even though the émigrés had a tendency to complain about the lack of realism in the antiNazi films, their input is nevertheless discernible. Not only did they manage to include in the narrative news from Nazi-occupied territory, gleaned from the exile press (e.g. Aufbau15), but in some cases they even had their own experience to draw on, as in the case of Mortal Storm (MGM, USA 1940), which owes its accurate depiction of Nazi barbarity to the émigré screenwriters George Froschel and Paul Hans Rameau, who had suffered at the hand of the Nazis.
Anti-Nazi-Filme ... was a landmark in film history inasmuch as it identifies a genre to which the émigrés measurably contributed. Horak shows how anti-Nazi films drew on other, preexisting genres such as, for instance, the gangster film, and how their narratives, symbols, and characters were modified to be recycled in the anti-Nazi films. Moreover, it is evident that Anti-Nazi-Filme ... is meant to inspire future researchers to follow up on the ground Horak has broken.
Fluchtpunkt Hollywood (Münster: MAKS, 1984) was published as an appendix to Anti-Nazi-Filme ..., Horak’s doctoral thesis. Fluchtpunkt can be regarded as an expansion of ‘The Palm Trees ...’ as the range of issues discussed is much broader. These issues include, for instance, emigration to Austria, Hungary, France and the UK, as these were the countries where most of the émigrés first sought refuge before finally settling in the US. Fluchtpunkt also makes it clear that it was political developments (e.g. the yielding to Nazism by Austria and Hungary; the invasion of France and the Blitzkrieg on the UK by Nazi Germany) that forced the émigrés to move on to the US. He also takes into account the film-business relations between Germany and the US prior to 1933, concluding that the subsequent integration of refugees arriving after the Nazi takeover was facilitated by the sizable German community that had already established itself in Hollywood by the time the majority of the exiles arrived. Other aspects he discusses in more detail than in ‘The Palm Trees .’ are the various waves of emigration (the first big wave arrived following the Anschluss, and the second after the outbreak of WWII), anti-Semitism and racism the émigrés faced in the US, and the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. However, certain topics receive more attention than others, such as the collaboration in both Europe and the US between Koster, Pasternak and Jackson. This anticipates a future preoccupation of Horak‘s, which culminated in an article he co-wrote with Asper (see below). Unsurprisingly, Fluchtpunkt also covers the anti-Nazi films which, of course, had become his chief preoccupation.
Besides being a compendium of film exile - in which regard it resembles a number of similar publications discussed above that came out at the same time - what sets Fluchtpunkt apart is that it was one of the first reference works on film exile. In fact, the better part of the book consists of a lexicon of biographical data pertaining to exiled film artists. Needless to say, in those pre-Internet days when Fluchtpunk was first published, and when scholars had limited access to reliable biographical data on former émigrés, Fluchtpunkt was an invaluable, if not unique, research tool, enabling the reader to gather information at a glance on a vast number of émigrés, including actors, directors, producers, and all kinds of below-the-line personnel.
Horak’s chapter on ‘Exilfilm’ in Geschichte des deutschen Films (Jacobsen, Kaes,
Prinzler (eds.). Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler: 1993) also draws on his previous publications, notably on Fluchtpunkt Hollywood and Anti-Nazi-Filme, to provide a comprehensive summary of what was by now the mature field of exile research. The article allowed Horak to raise important new questions, such as the definition of exile film as opposed to film exile. Horak explains that exile film and film exile are two different entities, the latter, according to him, denoting the actual duration of exile of the exiled film artist, while the former specifically defines a film ‘that was made outside Germany after 1933, produced, directed, and written by German emigrants’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 101).
Demarcating exile film is indeed crucial, as it allows us to identify the possible contributions and influences of the émigrés on the film industry in the host country, be it France, the Netherlands, or the United States. Hence Horak rightly claims that ‘exile film must be embedded in film history as a chapter that runs parallel to that of the Third Reich’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102), for, as he makes clear, ‘for a lot of German film-makers of the 1960s, the real German film history was not defined by fathers tainted by the Third Reich, but by émigrés like Fritz Lang and Lotte Eisner’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102). Examples in support of Horak might include Werner Herzog’s friendship with Lotte Eisner and his remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (Prana-Film Gmbh, Germany 1921; Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/ ZDF/ Gaumont International S.A.,W-Germany 1979); Schlöndorffs acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 1980, in which he thanked Fritz Lang in